Almost everyone is familiar with the gospel accounts of Jesus' birth. We all know Mary and Joseph, the angels and the shepherds, the stable and the manger.

But there is another gospel passage that Christian churches frequently read on Christmas day. It is taken from the Gospel of John, and it speaks of Jesus as the "light that shines in darkness" and tells us that "the darkness did not overcome it."

The notion of enduring light is comforting in this season of short days and long nights. When we pick up a newspaper to learn of massacres in far-off places, racial unrest at home, and a rising tide of economic prosperity that is lifting only the boats of people who are already well off, it too is comforting to believe that darkness will not overcome us. I believe this.

God means to comfort us, yet God means to challenge us too. It is in the nature of light to fall indiscriminately. The sun shines on the just and the unjust alike. It lights the way of those we love and those we do not. It warms those who share our values and those who oppose them. Having worked so hard to "deserve" God's grace, we are sometimes troubled to find that God, like the father in the story of the prodigal son, doesn't always play by rules we find fair.

The church, like most other institutions, has struggled to absorb this lesson. We find the traces of its slow and gradual awakening in the Acts of the Apostles when Peter, after spending time with a family of Gentiles, comes to realize that the message of Jesus was not intended exclusively for the Jewish nation, but for all of humankind. "I truly understand," he says, "that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him."

Over millennia the church has come to understand that showing no partiality requires us to overcome the deep-seated cultural prejudices that we sometimes confuse with gospel truth. The church, like the rest of the society, has learned that discriminating on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and physical and mental aptitudes casts out those whom God wishes to draw in. It assumes that God has stationed us with a guest list at the gates of the heavenly kingdom, and that is not the case.

God's ability to confound our expectations is on gracious display in the story of Jesus' birth. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us that the Son of God and the savior of the world was born to a conquered people living in what Roman rulers considered an uncivilized backwater. His parents were so vulnerable that they had no place to sleep on the night he was born, and so his mother gave birth to him among the lowliest of animals. His first human heralds were shepherds, men who lived among their flocks and were distrusted by the better people in the society of that time.

To feel the force of this story, try to imagine your own version of the Nativity. Where is the most insignificant place in your world? Who are the least significant people? Which is the most backward culture? Whom do you trust the least? Now imagine that God has chosen to share with these people a revelation that will not only save your life but also transform the world. This, the gospels tell us, is how the news of Jesus' birth would have landed in his time.

The story of the Nativity is an announcement, that God's values are not our values. A glance at the front page of a newspaper, or an honest inventory of our own lives, suggests that despite our best efforts, this remains the case. We remain a people deeply invested in the idea of merit. We hold fast to the notion that as individuals, and, some would argue, as a nation, we are uniquely virtuous, and therefore uniquely deserving. God, we like to tell ourselves, has recognized our merit and rewarded us accordingly.

The stories that Christians read at Christmas, of a God whose birth was hidden from the most powerful and sophisticated people of the time but revealed to shepherds, should disabuse us of these mistaken notions. A light shines in darkness and falls on all of God's children. Our part is not to throw others into shade, but to manifest our gratitude.

The Rt. Rev. Sean Rowe is bishop provisional for the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem.